COPERNICUS OBSERVER Newsletter #October 2014

In an interview with Copernicus Observer, Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea, the Director for Implementation, Governance and Semester at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment (DG ENV) spoke about the role of DG ENV in respect to the Copernicus Programme.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has been using Earth Observation technologies in its activities for more than a quarter of a century. Representatives of FAO explain how Copernicus data will contribute towards improving information relating to food supply and droughts at the global level.

The National Observatory of Athens in Greece has signed an agreement with the European Space Agency (ESA) to establish a national Mirror Site that will provide direct access to Copernicus Sentinel data, making a significant step forward in the national and regional exploitation of the imagery supplied by the satellites.

The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) provides near real-time and historical data on forest fires from pre-fire conditions to assessing post-fire damages. This system will be integrated next year into the Copernicus Emergency Management Service as part of its Early Warning component.

The Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) was activated on six separate occasions during the months of June to September 2014, due to a series of extreme weather events across Europe and Asia. These activations resulted in the generation of 59 satellite mapping products covering several locations around the two continents.

The Copernicus Climate Change service will bring together and integrate many different sources of information about the Earth, including the dedicated and operational Sentinel satellites and the other Copernicus services.

For several decades, UNESCO has been using satellite data for the protection of natural and cultural World Heritage sites. Free, full and open access to data from the Sentinel satellites will contribute to effective sustainable development and conservation of natural and cultural landmarks across the globe.

The FP7 project, CORE-CLIMAX, contributes to the preparation of the operational Copernicus Climate Change service by assessing the status of Climate Data Records (CDRs) through a system that identifies Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) and reanalyses historical climate data.

Following the loss of Envisat, the continuity of a pioneering project aiming to map and prevent geohazards in Italy has been assured by the Copernicus programme through its first dedicated satellite, Sentinel-1. The development of innovative techniques for measuring ground movements and geological instability was pioneered by scientists at the Polytechnic University of Milan and commercialised by its spin-off company, Tele-Rilevamento Europa.

Weather4D Pro is a smartphone and tablet application, designed for marine navigation, that can calculate the optimal route for a boat, sailing or fishing vessel’s journey, using data from the precursor to the Copernicus Marine Monitoring service, MyOcean2.